Resources / Several hundred islanders showed up at the Blaisdell Arena last week to listen to and testify on proposals for a new, comprehensive federal ocean policy before the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force. The task force is the brainchild of President Barack Obama, whose memo to the two dozen agencies involved calls for “a comprehensive, ecosystem-based framework for the longterm protection of our resources.” But ironically, Hawaii was not among the sites initially chosen to host the “listening sessions.” A concerted (mostly online) outcry from local environmentalists and others provided the impetus for Tuesday’s meeting.

Technologically, the session was a bust. The event was set up to be broadcast live via satellite to conference rooms on the neighbor islands, Saipan and Washington, D.C. These locations, however, mostly couldn’t hear what was going on in Honolulu. A microphone placed before the testifiers here erupted several times with ear-shattering feedback before being replaced.

Not that it mattered much. One got the feeling that the people who attended would have stood up in a hurricane to testify. Department of Land and Natural Resources Chairperson Laura Thielen set the tone early by reminding the task force of the unique challenges presented to those who live on land surrounded by ocean–a message that struck a rather somber note given reports of the deadly tsunami that hit Samoa earlier in the day.

“Virtually all of our populations live within a mile of the ocean” said Thielen. “And as we’ve seen in Samoa today, this exposes us to vulnerability from 360 degrees. Our land mass is small. Our fresh water is a fragile lens, perched atop salt water–an aquifer vulnerable to intrusion.”

A “panel of experts” preceded public testifiers, running the gamut from Kalani Souza of the Olohana Foundation sharing his mana’o from an indigenous perspective to Glenn Hong, president of Young Brothers, talking about how the channels between the islands (not to mention the big channel between here and the West Coast) compose Hawaii’s highway system. Hong said that 80 percent of all the goods consumed here are imported, and that 98 percent of that is delivered to Hawaii by sea-going vessels. Hong spoke of the “incredible amount of trash” his employees encountered on their inter-island routes, characterizing it as a “cancer.”

Marvin Heskett of the Surfrider Foundation expanded on the trash theme, and the potential bioaccumulative danger of plastic particles in the ocean.

Other experts spoke of the need for expanding Hawaii aquaculture. Randy Cates, founder and CEO of Hukilau Foods, who raises moi in open-ocean pens off Ewa and has applied to the State for permits to expand his operation, stated that although the people of Hawaii eat more fish per capita than any other state, 82 percent of it is imported.

Public testimony followed the experts–although of the testifiers were clearly experts in their fields as well. Brian Taylor, dean of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at UH, called the world’s reefs “the rainforest of the sea,” and pointed out that they are as threatened as the earth’s tropical forests and the retreating polar ice caps.

Dale Bonar of the Maui Coastal Land Trust focused on banning the aquarium fish trade, a totally unregulated industry that “uses our reef fish as ornaments for aquariums around the world.”

That the inshore waters of Hawaii are vulnerable to what happens on land was on the mind of several speakers. Molokai activist Walter Ritte, who lives on one of the most eroded islands on earth, exhorted the panel to consider the importance of better land management. “From the top of the mountain to the ocean: Plant, plant, plant,” he said, explaining that the planting of trees at mid-elevation and higher would reverse decades of animal and human overuse–such a program would also provide jobs to Molokai, where unemployment is the highest in the state.

Some well-worn animosities also surfaced during testimony. Sean Martin, long-line vessel owner and current chair of WESPAC (the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council) warned that whatever the federal government might be planning in the way of fisheries management, it sounded like more centralized bureaucracy to him. “What we need is a place-based management of the resource. Tribal, local. Where the people who know the place best are the ones making policy.”

But attorney Paul Achitoff of Earthjustice, has heard it all before and isn’t buying. “The WESPAC testifiers are all reading from the same script. ‘Local’ doesn’t mean indigenous fishermen–it means the long line industry in Hawaii. Martin and WESPAC were the main force speaking out against (the formation) of Monument status for the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Conservation interests have no voice at WESPAC.”

More than 90 people signed up to testify at the meeting, and although it continued on well past the time allotted, not everyone got the chance to have their say. The citizenry was invited to post commentary online, at [www.whitehouse.gov].